Saturday, December 17, 2016

‘Rogue One’ Reviews: Here’s What the Critics Say

Movie
critics got their first look at “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story” on
Monday night. As their reviews spread across the internet on Tuesday, it
became clear there was little consensus about the film. The reviews
were mostly positive, but there were several notable exceptions.

Let’s start with, oh, to pick one at random, The New York Times. A.O. Scott called it a “thoroughly mediocre movie” with “a surprisingly hackish script.”

“Rogue
One,” named for the call sign of an imperial cargo ship appropriated by
rebel fighters, is the opposite of that vessel. Masquerading as a
heroic tale of rebellion, its true spirit is Empire all the way down.

On MTV, Amy Nicholson
said the film’s director, Gareth Edwards, had an opportunity to
“explore a never-ending frontier,” but instead, “we’re trapped on a
round-trip cruise to the moon.”

Audiences
once packed theaters to gawk at the future; now, it’s to soak in the
past. The emphasis is on packing in as much nostalgia as possible and
tersely editing it together to resemble a film.

The Miami Herald was also underwhelmed. Rene Rodriguez said the end was rousing, but the journey there was “about as exciting as a long drive down the Florida Turnpike.”

Aside
from answering the burning question of “Why did the designers of the
Death Star leave the station’s exhaust ports so vulnerable to a missile
attack?” there’s almost nothing in “Rogue One” that adds substance to
the “Star Wars” realm.

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In USA Today, Brian Truitt
said the movie was undermined by its ties to the original trilogy, and
it “misses a real chance to turn the familiar into something
remarkable.”

“Rogue
One” feels small in scale, even with its signature heroism and sci-fi
action, and its main players mostly lack the charm that made Rey, Finn
and Poe in last year’s “The Force Awakens” — or Han, Luke and Leia back
in the day — so special.

Stephanie Zacharek wrote in Time that it was “almost pedantic in its inoffensiveness.”

“Rogue
One: A Star Wars Story” will not change lives for the worse or for the
better, and it will — or ought to — offend no one. Welcome to the
Republic of the Just O.K.

The New Yorker was perhaps the most harsh. Calling the film “lobotomized and depersonalized,” Richard Brody wondered: Is it time to abandon the “Star Wars” franchise?

The
director of “Rogue One,” Gareth Edwards, has stepped into a mythopoetic
stew so half-baked and overcooked, a morass of pre-instantly
overanalyzed implications of such shuddering impact to the series’
fundamentalists, that he lumbers through, seemingly stunned or
constrained or cautious to the vanishing point of passivity, and lets
neither the characters nor the formidable cast of actors nor even the
special effects, of which he has previously proved himself to be a
master, come anywhere close to life.

More critics seemed to love it, though

Several
other critics were far more complimentary, and some even considered it
among the best of the eight films in the “Star Wars” canon.

Entertainment Weekly’s Chris Nashawaty said the film “gets the obsessive need-to-know curiosity that the most rabid ‘Star Wars’ fans have always had.”

“Rogue
One” would have been a very good stand-alone sci-fi movie if it came
out under a different name. But what makes it especially exciting is how
it perfectly snaps right into the “Star Wars” timeline and connects
events we already know by heart with ones that we never even considered.

Richard Lawson wrote inVanity Fairthat it is “a bracing and dizzying marvel, propulsively pitched and even, I dare say, moving.”

It
fits into this universe’s milieu with ease and style, while exploring
new emotional and narrative terrain. It may be as good a corporate space
opera prequel as could possibly be.

Jen Yamato in The Daily Beast declared it the best “Star Wars” movie since “The Empire Strikes Back.”

Contained
yet expansive, nostalgic yet new, it introduces striking heroes and
villains and fills its 2 hours and 13 minutes with a narrative that fits
snugly into [the] canon. But where “The Force Awakens” leaned on a
family-friendly appeal with its innocent do-gooder leads and
tantrum-throwing baddie, “Rogue One” satisfies a darker itch.

In Variety, Peter Debruge said it is “not the crass cash-grab skeptics may have feared.”

Younger
audiences will be bored, confused, or both. But for the original
generation of “Star Wars” fans who weren’t sure what to make of episodes
one, two, and three, “Rogue One” is the prequel they’ve always wanted.

In Rolling Stone, Peter Travers
said the spinoff “has the same primitive, lived-in, emotional, loopy,
let’s-put-on-a-show spirit that made us fall in love with the original
trilogy.

As
a movie, it can feel alternately slow and rushed, cobbled together out
of spare parts, and in need of more time of the drawing board. But the
damn thing is alive and bursting with the euphoric joy of discovery that
caught us up in the adventurous fun nearly four decades ago.

In Wired, Angela Watercutter said it was unfairly burdened by the inevitable discussion of how it fit into the postelection climate in the United States.

Had Rogue One not found itself the avatar of All Things Now, we might even be able to talk about whether or not it’s, you know, good. That’s too bad, because it is.

Bryan Bishop wrote in The Verge that several of the characters “feel thin and undefined” and struggled with the workload of building itself from the ground up.

The
film soars when it abandons all pretense of being a space opera, and
fully embraces the bombastic modern action movie that’s at its core,
giving it a unique identity that does indeed stand apart from other
entries in the series. Given that, it’s hard to shake the feeling that
“Rogue One” takes place in a “Star Wars” world, but isn’t necessarily a
“Star Wars” movie.

Peter Bradshaw wrote in The Guardian that it was an “exhilarating, good-natured and enjoyable adventure.”

“Rogue
One” doesn’t really go rogue at any stage, and it isn’t a pop culture
event like “The Force Awakens,” in whose slipstream this appears; part
of its charm resides in the eerie, almost dreamlike effect of
continually producing familiar elements, reshuffled and reconfigured, a
reaching back to the past and hinting at a preordained future.

In The Chicago Tribune, Michael Phillips said it is “rough around the edges, hectic in its crosscutting but increasingly effective as kinetic cinema.”

The
new movie is a little bit “Guardians of the Galaxy,” a little bit
“Dirty Dozen” in its mass wartime slaughter, and a pretty good time once
it gets going.

In Deadline, Pete Hammond
called it “a rousing and wholly entertaining take that proves you don’t
have to go along with the recipe in order to serve up a satisfying meal
for fans and non-fans alike.”

I
have to say I am surprised that I liked the first “stand-alone” entry
in the franchise, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” as much as I did. It
is not hype on my part to say I really think this could be my favorite
of all of them.